Q: Is there any single site where virtually all sellers who have an affiliate program are listed, noting which major network they are associated with? In other words, does someone maintain a searchable list, or one in alphabetical order, where one can look up, for example, which affiliate program Wal-mart, or Kmart, or any other seller is itself affiliated with. It is a constant pain if I am considering signing up with a particular merchant to try to figure out if they work with Linkshare, Commission Junction, Performics or other program.
A: The sort of resource you describe is an affiliate program directory. There are dozens, if not hundreds of them out there, but not have full coverage of the industry.
My two favorites are the two oldest affiliate program directories, Refer-it and AssociatePrograms.com respectively.
Refer-it currently boasts over 6,905 affiliate programs in their directory, while AssociatePrograms.com has 7,412. However, I was unable to find listings for either of your examples, K-Mart or Wal-Mart. And that’s the problem. The results in the affiliate program directories are submitted by the affiliate managers, so these results rely on affiliate managers (1) being aware of the affiliate program directories, and (2) considering it to be worth their time to submit their programs in the directories.
Since the landscape of affiliate program directories is very imperfect, I launched AffiliateTip.com earlier this year, in an effort to build a better directory. K-Mart and Wal-Mart – not in mine, either.
Because of this lack of coverage, many affiliates just search for the affiliate programs in a search engine. For instance, if you search for wal-mart affiliate on Google, you will see that one of the results is for the Wal-Mart affiliate application to the program on LinkShare.
So it’s easy enough to find the application, but that doesn’t tell you the commission rate, return days, whether they have a data feed, etc.
Back to your question – no, unfortunately there is no source for all of this information currently.